asted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord's murder;

and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture,
with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the
falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines
are _merely_ absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should
join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.

But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the
hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?

3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare _must_ have been conscious
of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it?
And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.'
But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote
bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere
write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech
are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make
his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of
bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech
seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears
'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he
total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more
disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect,
there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of Aeneas;
and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there
is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same
species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there
are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same
degree, occurs.

Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would
strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:

Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

Are Pyrrhus's 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced
with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers
'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,'
and 'spongy officers,' and even